VizAlerts 2.0.0 Released

(Note that this is no longer the most recent version. Please see the main page where the latest version is stickied)

Hey Everyone. Thanks once again to Jonathan Drummey's dedicated coding help, and Toby Erkson's hawkeye testing efforts, we are happy to announce (just in time for TC16 in Austin!) that we're releasing v2.0.0 of VizAlerts!

New Features:

Improved Administration

Most of the administrator configuration in VizAlerts is now handled by editing a view on Tableau Server, rather than in the yaml file. This change means that you’ll now have nearly unlimited flexibility in defining alert restrictions.

Added config options around SSL certificate validation

Easier Advanced Alert Configuration

The fields used in Advanced Alerts no longer need to be exact! “Email To *, “Email To”, or “Email To Two 2” will all be recognized as containing the To email addresses.

This also means you can set up alerts with different content using a single datasource, simply by copying the fields and changing the names for use in a different sheet.

Faster

VizAlerts is now multi-threaded, which allows it to gracefully scale to process large numbers of alerts in a timely fashion. Scale it up to however much your Tableau Server can handle.

SMS support

VizAlerts is no longer constrained to just sending email! It can now use the Twilio service to send SMS messages. These are configured in an Advanced Alert with the new “SMS Action” fields. These can be used separately from the Email fields, or together if you wish to send both an email and an SMS.

Upgrading from VizAlerts 1.0.0 or 1.1

Here are instructions on how to upgrade from VizAlerts 1.x to VizAlerts 2.0:

Check the Installation Prerequisites below. The major change is that you will need Tableau Desktop Professional available in order to complete the installation.

Backup your VizAlerts 1.x directory.

In Task Scheduler, disable the existing VizAlerts scheduled task.

Download version 2 from GitHub and unzip to a temporary location alongside your existing VizAlerts folder.

Install the two new Python packages:

pip install twilio

pip install phonenumberslite

Follow the instructions in the Installation Guide for the following sections:

Open the ScheduledTriggerViews Viz.

Configure the ScheduledTriggerViews Viz.

Publish the ScheduledTriggerViews Viz.

To properly migrate your previous settings into the new format, you will likely need to look at your existing 1.x settings in the …\[VizAlerts 1.x folder]\config\vizalerts.yaml file, for reference.

Use a text editor (ideally with a diff function) to migrate the existing 1.x settings in the …\[VizAlerts 1.x folder]\config\vizalerts.yaml to the new v2.0 vizalerts.yaml.

Note that many configuration options are now MISSING from the new yaml file because they are now in the ScheduledTriggerViews viz that you configured in step 6.

Migrate all your old settings wherever the same option remains in the new file.

Set the values for new settings:

server.user.domain (remove the domain name you used in the v1.x server.user and put it here instead).

If when publishing in step 5 above you changed the ScheduledTriggerViews site from default, workbook name, and/or view name then you will need to update the vizalerts.source.viz and vizalerts.viz.site, otherwise leave them as the default.

server.certfile : if you want to validate the SSL certificate for your Tableau Server, you’ll need to specify a path to the certificate bundle in .pem format.

SMS Settings : You can leave the defaults for right now if you don’t want to test SMS messaging at this point. If you have set up an account on Twilio then you can add that information here from your Twilio account page.

threads : Two is a safe number to start with. We recommend roughly four threads if you have 50+ active alerts running.

Run VizAlerts from the command line in the v2.0 folder to verify that it runs without error.

Run a test_alert from an existing Tableau view, then run VizAlerts v2.0 from the command line to verify that it is able to deliver messages as before.

In Task Scheduler edit the VizAlerts task Action to point to your new v2.0 folder and enable the task.

Hope you guys enjoy! As always, let us know if you have any questions or issues here, as a new Discussion in the VizAlerts group.